Luna: New Moon

My father didn’t remember the North Americans landing on the moon, but he told me old Mão de Ferro did. He was drinking in a bar in Belo Horizonte. The television was switched to the football and Mão de Ferro almost started a fight insisting the bar owner switch over to the moon landing. This is history, he said. We won’t see a greater thing on our time. Faked, the others in the bar shouted. Shot on a Hollywood sound stage. But he stood in front of the television, staring up at the black and images, daring anyone to turn it back to the football. And I remember when the Mackenzies put robots on the moon. I too was in a bar, with my study group. I had gone back to the homeland, to Minas Gerais, and DEMIN, the mining institute, for post-grad. I was even more of an oddity in Ouro Preto. No: I was unique. I was the only woman. The men were over-polite and clubbish. I would not let them leave me out, so I was drinking beer with them in that bar. The bar owner was flicking between sports channels when he dropped for a moment on to the news. I saw the moon, I saw machines, I saw wheel tracks. I shouted at the bar man – hey hey hey, leave it. I was the only person in that bar watching the screen, watching history happening. The Australian Mackenzie Mining Corporation had sent robots to the moon to prospect for rare earth metals for the IT industry. Why aren’t you watching this? I wanted to to shout to my group. Why can’t you see what I see? Call yourself engineers? Watching that screen I felt a flash of understanding, a brilliance in my head. I felt as if my breath were catching, as if my heart were skipping every third, fourth beat. It was feeling of the impossible becoming not just possible, but achievable. By me. Then the news item moved on – it was far down the news, no one was interested in space and science. News was what telenovella stars and models did. I went out of the bar into the beer garden and sat on the wall under the dusty trees and looked up into the night. I saw the moon. I said to myself, there are things up there, making money.

My father came to see me. He came on the bus. I knew instantly the news was bad. Ouro Preto was a long way but my father would have made an adventure out of the drive. He had lost the dealership. No one was buying high-end Mercedes any more, not even in Barra. He’d been careful: bought out the apartment and my education was safe. As long I delivered in the next two years and did not fill the fridge with beer on a weekly basis. But the business was over and at his age there was no hope of him re-skilling for the machine-code economy, let alone finding another job. He was sorry yet proud – he had done everything he could the best he could. The markets had failed him.

Then Our Lady of Tuberculosis came and knocked his plans off the table. Caio, boy-baby; kid brother. Caizinho: the runt of the litter we called him. He had never moved out, perpetually thirteen years old it seemed. As jobs collapsed and marriages failed and families imploded, the rest of Mamãe Corta’s seven babies moved back in. All but me. The learner, the keeper. Then Caio breathed in bacillus of TDR-tuberculosis – a bus, a classroom, mass. There were three types of tuberculosis then. MDR, XDR, TDR. Multiply Drug Resistant, Extensively Drug Resistant, Totally Drug Resistant. MDR resists the first-line antibiotics. XDR resists even the second-line drugs, which are basically toxic chemotherapy treatments. TDR: you can guess that. The White Lady we called it, and she wafted into Caio’s lungs and grew there.

Mamãe turned a room into a sanatorium; sealed it up with plastic. Papa engineered an air-conditioning unit. They couldn’t afford the hospital, they couldn’t afford the drugs. They bought experimental treatments on the black market – experimental Russian phages; chemo-hecked generic pharmaceuticals. I came home. I saw Caio through plastic. It wasn’t safe to go into the room. Mãe slid his meals in on trays my siblings stole from McDonalds, in through two layers of heavy plastic. Caio double-bagged the refuse. I saw him, I saw Pai tired to the marrow, I saw Mãe talking to her saints and orixas. I saw my brothers and sisters and their children scraping a réal where they could: scrap dealing here, buying and selling there, running an animal lottery there. Caio would die but I couldn’t begrudge my family saving every centavo in hope. They could not afford my completing my post-grad. There was a way I could finish. The advertisements had been appearing in the professional journals and sites, within weeks of the Mackenzie landing.

I applied to work on the moon.

My adviser of studies helped me with the loan application. My paper on solar distillation of rare earth elements from lunar regolith marked me as a valuable asset in lunar development. I got a contract with Mackenzie Metals. My application was approved, I got the loan.